Heal Thyself
by Larbo
Summary: My take on what the 50th anniversary show COULD be (won't be anything like this, but so what?). The 10th Doctor's half-human copy, John Smith, embarks on a mission to reclaim his Time Lord heritage, a mission which will push the Doctor - all of the Doctors - to their absolute limits. Not remotely interested in ships or pairings or slash - this is a plot fic pure and simple.
1. Prologue - Pete's World

Heal Thyself

Prologue

Rose Tyler had faced down demons and aliens, had watched Earth's Sun bloat and explode and raze the Earth to ribbons in the throes of its final fiery end, and she had survived. She had seen the very stars above her head wink out, one by one at first and then all in a rush, and she faced the seemingly omnipotent maniac responsible for this attempt at realicide, and she had survived.

On the last night of her life, Rose Tyler was going home to the man she loved.

Not her original home, of course. That was beyond the veil, in an Earth she was forever separated from through some quirk of wibbley-wobbley nonsense that she could never comprehend. This was her home on _this_ Earth, one much like her own except for the ravages inflicted upon it and its populace by Cybus Industries and its brutal creations, the Cybermen.

Oh, and there were flying airships, like, _everywhere_. From her hazy understanding of parallel realities, it was pretty much a toss-up between goatee worlds and Zeppelin worlds.

Not her original home. For that matter, not her original man she-

_No_. Rose forced the thought from her mind with a conscious effort. John Smith was, in every way that mattered, the man she had fallen for, the man who had taken her from a council estate existence of chips and department store jobs and had whisked her away in his magic blue box across time and space, across the surface of the universe as easily and effortlessly as a stone skimming a pond. He had chosen her, he had protected her and they had run into danger and from danger more times than she could count, together, arms and legs pumping and heart pounding and it had been _glorious_.

It was beginning to rain. She shrugged her coat over her head, increasing her pace from a walk to a half-hop as she crossed the distance between the car (sleek, electric, little bit weird) and the house (massive, ornate, _really _weird). The house – she steadfastly refused to call it a _mansion_, out of some sense of loyalty to her roots – was a present from her Dad, one of the country's most powerful men in this reality instead of someone who would have needed a running start to qualify as a loveable loser in her reality. Of course, he was alive in this reality and not dead like he was in hers, which-

Lightning lit up the skies of London. Rose flinched, and then gathered herself, glad that none of the house's staff (who seemed immune to good-natured dismissal, despite her many attempts to do so) were outside to see that. She pulled on the great doors, and found to her puzzlement that they did not budge an inch. Her fist rattled the door once, twice, three times.

"Jones!" she called, hoping the old butler wasn't sitting with his headphones on listening to the _Archers _omnibus, and trying not to reflect on how odd it was not to have a key to her own house. The truth was, though, Rose hadn't really spent a lot of time here of late. She'd been…too busy, yes, that was it; she had a prominent position in Torchwood, after all, the organisation dedicated to stopping not only the last vestiges of the Cybermen menace but also all the _other _craziness that most people – even people in crazy Zeppelin-realities – never suspected lurked out there.

"Jones!" she called again, as the thunder rolled and cracked and the rain intensified. An overhang above the door was sheltering her from the worst of the downpour, but she was tired and damp and she was _rich_, dammit. She owned a _Jacuzzi. _Screw _this_.

Muttering darkly, she started to fish through her pockets for her phone, and it was then that the door finally opened and he appeared.

"Rose," said John Smith. "You're home."

She ducked into the house and slammed the door, leaving the storm brewing outside to do what it might against the walls. The interior, a grand hallway splitting off to the reception rooms left and right and the staircase in the middle, all marbled and statued with a sort of medieval bling, was almost in total darkness; only a few cursory lights illuminated the place.

"Meter running low?" Rose said, shrugging off her coat and wondering where everyone was. It seemed like some member of staff was always bustling about, whether it was Jones taking her coat or Mellor endlessly buffering the floors or one of the gardeners tinkering with the potted plants. She knew their names, she thought to herself defensively, she just…couldn't be bothered thinking of them right at this minute, thank you. Shut up, brain.

John Smith was dressed in one of his trademark steel blue suits. He looked always on the verge of scruffiness, but somehow he pulled it off in a way that suggested elegance. Honestly, it made her want to scream at him. He reached inside his suit jacket and produced a familiar device. A quick press or two, a brief glow, and the lights all over the house came on.

"Better?" he said, smiling dazzlingly.

It was when he smiled that he looked least like-

She kissed him then, kissed him to stop the thought from advancing any further. His lips were soft against hers and his arms held her and for a little moment the world felt right.

"Where is everyone, then?" she said. "D'you give 'em the night off?"

"I…" for a moment he seemed lost for words; in others it would have been a sign of a lack of inspiration but in him, she knew, it was almost that his brain was so far ahead of such simplistic concepts as mouths that sometimes there was a loss of synchronicity. "I told them we didn't need them anymore."

"You did?" she said, as they moved into the leftmost reception room. She'd built herself a sort of den here amidst the finery; a comfy bean bag, a stupidly huge television, and a little storage unit full of "Laser-Dees" that she could pop into her Betamax-branded player. Bloody Zeppelin realities.

He surprised her by taking her hand and guiding her to sit on one of the bigger sofas, as he sat beside her. Lightning flashed outside again, and though the thunder was muted, it was still there in the background, rumbling discontentedly.

"We're leaving, Rose," he said.

She couldn't reply for a moment. She wasn't going to assume anything as stupid as that he meant he was going abroad, visiting another country. She knew full well what he meant when they were _leaving_. She just had to figure out how she felt.

"How?" she settled for. "The TARDIS-"

On the beach, in Bad Wolf Bay, when she'd said goodbye to the Doctor after the defeat of the Daleks, he'd given John Smith a piece of "coral" as he called it. A cutting, from his own TARDIS, for the cutting from his own body that had grown into the half-human, half-Time Lord hybrid that called itself John Smith.

"You've never been able to get it to work before," she said, all in a rush, like a cork popping from a champagne bottle.

His hand squeezed hers a little tighter. "It was my human half, Rose. That was the problem. Time Lords are born with an innate knowledge of how the time/space continuum works. It's in our blood, in our DNA. It _is _our DNA. A Time Lord could build a time machine out of loo rolls and PVA glue. But my _human _half…"

He looked away.

"It's not a dirty word," Rose said.

"I didn't say that it was. You're human, Rose, and I love you more than I've ever loved anything."

She wanted to scream. Why didn't it thrill her when he said those words? Across millennia of time, from one end of the universe to the next, she had run beside the Doctor and thought those words would never come. John Smith meant every word he said. They had built a life, in this place, a life where she was important and powerful and where her Mum and Dad were impossibly together.

Yes, okay, so it was a Frankenstein life stitched together of the best parts of two separate realities. So _what_? It shouldn't have mattered to her. It should have felt real.

She wanted to scream because he was telling her they were leaving this pocket universe and her first thought was not for the parents or the life she would leave behind, perhaps forever, it was because her first thought above all others was that if she could go, maybe she would get to see _him _again.

"How?" she said again, mechanically.

He stood. He hadn't let go of her hand yet. "I want to show you," he said, and the man whose shape she loved but whose soul she couldn't bring herself to led her through that massive mansion she lived in but didn't own. They emerged into the grounds at the back of the house, he fiddled with that screwdriver of his and the raindrops fizzled into steam above their heads in a perfect crescent as they walked toward the outbuilding, a glorified shed that had been there since-

-they'd moved in-

-last week-

-forever-

-she'd never seen before.

She stopped and gasped for breath. Looking at the outbuilding made her teeth ache and her brain hurt. It was squat and square, and though originally she'd taken it to be small, now as she looked it wasn't small at all, wasn't much smaller than the mansion if truth be told, throwing the old place into its shadow. Night was falling fast as the rain spiralled down all around them and the skies above London loomed and rumbled, the city a toddler getting ready to throw a tantrum.

Lightning flashed. Colour returned to the world for an eyeblink. The outbuilding was blue, deepest deepest blue.

"What do you think?" John Smith asked softly. "I finished it last month, and yesterday, and a year ago. And maybe tomorrow too."

"What's happening?" Rose asked. Her voice was faint.

"Temporal labour pains," he replied. "TARDISes are grown on Gallifrey for a reason. The Eye of Rassilon stabilises their bloom onto the cosmos. Earth isn't accustomed to it."

_Run, Rose. Run fast. _She ignored the insistent voice inside her head; after all, she'd been doing it for many months now. She was good at it. "It's affecting time?"

"Everything a TARDIS will ever do is there from the moment it awakes. Imagine, Rose. Imagine being born ancient. Imagine knowing how will you die at the same instant you take your first breath."

"It's angry," she said, surprising herself with the words even as she spoke them. "It's angry and sad."

John Smith looked at her. She'd grown accustomed to that face and the owner of its original model hiding his emotions, burying them beneath banter or jokes or just plain silliness, but always just below the waterline you could see a glimpse here or there of infinite sadness, grief beyond counting, kindness without limit. She hadn't been surprised when she'd fallen in love with this man. She'd been surprised everyone else he met hadn't done the same.

"It wants to go home," he said.

She found she couldn't lie anymore, that she just didn't have the strength.

"So do I."

He flashed that smile. "Course you do! It's not enough for you, this," and he waved at the house, and the world…and at himself. "Doesn't seem real, does it – nahhhhh. Too good to be true, getting your own action-figure version of _THE DOCTOR_. Now with matching human emotion accessories."

"I'm sorry," she said, tears rolling down her face.

He cupped her chin tenderly then, and raised her head up gently so he could look into her eyes. "Rose," he said, his voice gentle, "you don't _need_ to be sorry. I understand. I'm not the man you fell in love with. How _could _I be? I can't even build a TARDIS, even when I'm given all I should need. I can't make a girl like you love me, no matter how much I try, how much I want to. I'm half-human. I'll grow old and I'll die on this world, in this universe, half of what I should have been."

"But…" she said, confused, looking back to that great hulking presence of the outbuilding behind them, "you _did _build a TARDIS."

"I built a shell," John Smith said. "Even then, I had to cheat."

He stepped away from her, letting go of her hand, moving toward the outbuilding and its doors – huge great things, Rose saw, but each one with three windows, almost as a homage to the TARDIS she knew and loved. She felt a shudder of sympathy go through her for this man at that moment; his entire existence was a homage, a lesser copy of a greater sire, and she knew from the look in his eyes that he knew it. Who could _possibly_ hope to live up to the Doctor?

_RUN. ROSE, RUN. TURN AND RUN AWAY AS FAST AS YOU EVER HAVE AND DO NOT LOOK BACK, EVEN ONCE. _

The voice was so insistent that Rose actually felt herself take a step back reflexively, before she caught herself. The strangest thing was that it had seemed for a moment the voice – the thought, whatever it was – had spoken in a cadence that was not even her own; still a female voice, but older somehow, impossibly rich, a voice that normally should sound sultry and powerful and _a bit like him really_ but now just sounded urgent.

"Come away with me, Rose Tyler."

"My Mum…" she said weakly, knowing she was moving forward and trying to justify it to herself as she did so, "…my Dad…?"

Her fingers reached out and interlaced with his and they ran, together, covering the short distance to this gargantuan TARDIS and its doors, arms and legs pumping and heart pounding. At the doors, he fished for a key incongruous in its smallness and gave her another megawatt smile.

"They're already inside," he said, and threw the doors open.

Light bathed Rose, intense white light so strong her eyes needed a few moments to adjust, but when they did, when she could finally see what lay inside John Smith's TARDIS, she finally understood many things. She understood what he meant when he said her Mum and Dad were already inside. She understood what had made his TARDIS work after so long defunct.

Above all, she understood that it was far too late for her.

There was only one room inside that massive shell. And it was much, much-

"Smaller on the inside," John Smith said, as he thrust the point of the sonic screwdriver into Rose's back so hard it pierced her heart.

She gulped, once, twice. Blood was filling her throat. She looked down. Green light was emitting from her chest. He'd left the screwdriver in there.

He was in front of her again, kissing her, now supporting her and helping her stand, and talking, always talking. "I'll fix this," he was saying, his eyes full of tears. "I'll fix all of it, Rose, believe me I will. I'll fix the Time War, I'll fix your father's death. I have the strength to do what _he _couldn't, don't you understand? I had the strength to kill the Daleks. He didn't. That's why he exiled me here. He's afraid of me, of what I can do. Fixed points in time," he scoffed, and he staggered to support her weight as she began to lose the use of her legs, dragging her towards the central console of his TARDIS and the shining light emitting from beneath it, "when I'm through the only fixed points will be the ones _I _will fix."

Through failing sight, Rose managed to look up at the bodies of her father and mother, suspended upside-down from the ceiling directly above the TARDIS central console. White energy was transferring from them to the console below as it _thrummmmd _and _whirrrrd _and made all the wrong sort of noises.

"Vortex energy," John Smith said, sobbing openly now. "The kick this TARDIS needed to ignite, d-d-don't you see? He _knew _it would come to this…no, Rose, no…" he said desperately, as her eyes fluttered shut, he shook her until she came back from the brink of oblivion, her third and last time rising to the surface. "It needed more. It had to be you. You're going to _be_ the heart of my TARDIS, Rose Tyler. You're going home with me, and we're going to travel forever, you and I, and we're going to see_ everything_-"

She gasped something. Eager to hear, he stopped babbling. "Rose? Rose, what did you say?"

Rose gathered her strength, even as reality irised into black around her, even as she felt the last ebb of herself bleed away into the void. She looked him straight in the eye and made sure to speak slowly and deliberately.

"I feel sorry for you," she said, "when he finds you."

Her eyes closed for the final time. John Smith held her for longer than he should have, before the urgent flashing of the sonic screwdriver protruding from her chest finally reminded him of what needed to be done. Pressing a button on the central console, an access hatch opened to the heart of the TARDIS, a weak pulse of white light, a stuttering heartbeat.

John Smith kissed the only woman he'd ever loved one last time, and then he shoved her body down into that hole, closing the access hatch as quickly as he could-

The flash could be seen from Earth orbit.

The TARDIS cried out, a newborn being smacked, using its lungs for the first time to holler its anger at the cosmos. A ribbon of brilliant white light surged up from below, through the console, incinerating the bodies of Jackie and Pete Tyler in a fraction of a second, consuming their bodies and the meagre amount of vortex energy still residing within. Rose had been the main course.

John Smith sat with his back to the console. The sobs did not come. His eyes were red-rimmed, but there were no tears left. For who knew how long he sat, in that tiny room, listening to the cooing of his ancient, newborn TARDIS.

He stood, slowly, turning to face the controls. Breaking through the barrier between parallel universes was one of the most difficult feats of temporal engineering of all, but for this TARDIS, he knew it would be no problem.

Rose would want to go home.

"Allons-y," he said, to no-one in particular, and began the dematerialisation sequence.


	2. The Complete Obliteration Of Tooth Decay

**Heal Thyself**

**One: The Complete Obliteration Of Tooth Decay**

"Sontar-HA!"

"Sontar-HA!"

"Sontar-HA!"

Clara Oswald, the Girl Who Fell Through Time, the Impossible Girl, one of the greatest mysteries the cosmos had ever known, _really _needed to wee.

She thumped the bathroom door for the fifth time."Strax! _Strax_! STRAXXXXX!"

The door opened. Strax's little brown head poked out. To Clara's _great_ relief, he was still clad in his Sontaran battle armour. "Yes boy?" he demanded. "What is it? Be brief! I am engaged in battle!"

"Battle?!" Clara exclaimed, hopping from one foot to the other. "You're in the _bathroom_, Strax. You've been in the bathroom for over an _hour_. What could you be battling in there…" and even as she said the words, horrible, _horrible_ possibilities conjured themselves, mostly involving Sontaran battle armours and their apparent lack of exterior doors-

Strax produced an object like a knight wielding his lance, so forcefully that Clara jumped a half-step backwards lest he try to run her through with his…with his…

"It's a toothbrush," she said blankly.

"Yes!" Strax bit. "The foolish plaque thought it possible to overcome the might of the Sontaran empire's back molars," and insofar as it was possible for a man who lacked discernible lips, Strax sneered in disgust at the very thought, "the insolence!"

As Clara watched, he raised the toothbrush to his mouth and began short stabbing motions of the bristles across his teeth, set to the rhythm of a familiar beat. "Sontar-HA! Sontar-HA!"

In the control room of the TARDIS, the Doctor paused in his eternal tinkering with his beloved machine's innards and cocked his head to the side.

"Sontar-_YEOW_!"

The Doctor grinned, and went back to sticking his head inside one of the TARDIS panels. It was in this position that Strax found him when he came storming in. No one could _storm in _quite like Strax, all four foot something of him moving with the inexorability of continental drift. Currently this little landmass was brandishing a toothbrush in the Doctor's direction and rubbing his head ruefully.

"Doctor am I correct in my assumption that the boy called "Clara" has innumerable duplicates across all of time and space, all dedicated to saving your life?"

"Yes Strax," the Doctor called back, removing himself from the TARDIS innards and looking at the little alien with no small surprise.

"Good," Strax nodded, picking up his Sontaran pulse rifle and arming it with a gesture, "start looking for the next one."

"Wait!" the Doctor called, as Strax began to move off with the rifle. "You asked me to bring you to Sontar for the War Olympics. Remind me, Strax, am I _particularly_ welcome on Sontar?"

Strax almost swallowed one of his own lungs at this. "You are second only to the Rutan Host in the list of accursed enemies of the Sontaran Empire! If seen, you are _not _to be captured, _not _to be interrogated, _not _to have our plans explained to you in exacting detail. You are simply to be disintegrated at the earliest available opportunity, whereupon we will declare war on the individual atoms you leave behind and destroy the planet on which they are scattered, just to make sure."

"And yet here I am," the Doctor said cheerily, waving his arms, "providing a friendly drop-off service for my favourite butler-slash-nurse. In return," and he closed the gap between himself and Strax and plucked the pulse rifle from the diminutive alien's grasp with deceptively little effort, "and I want to make this _absolutely _clear, I expect my companions not to be annihilated in battle for the glory of the Sontaran Empire. Sontar-HA?"

Strax deflated visibly at this. "Sontar-_ha_," he muttered.

Clara came bounding into the console room at that moment, looking as though she had just kept an urgent appointment and was now enjoying her renewed freedom of movement. She caught the vibe between the Doctor and Strax and cocked her head to the side quizzically. "You boys okay?"

"I have agreed not to obliterate you," Strax replied.

There was a pause.

"I think," the Doctor said into the silence, "he's expecting a _thank you_."

Clara looked from the Doctor to Strax, and then back to the Doctor. He had a twinkle in his eye that simultaneously reassured her and told her she'd better keep a poker face on this. She did so with only a little difficulty, addressing Strax with all the grave import of someone negotiating the Treaty of Versailles. "Thank you, Strax," she said, and then inspiration struck, "I hope this agreement is only temporary, and that one day we may meet on the field of battle, where I look forward to cutting off your head and using your body as a coffee table, upon which to display your head."

"I _like_ this boy!" Strax cried, reaching out and thumping Clara on the arm in what he probably considered a companionable gesture of affection. Luckily, the Doctor was there to catch her before she tumbled completely off the raised console dias.

"So we're going to Sontar," Clara asked him, once Strax was off somewhere polishing his rifle, which she was frantically hoping wasn't a euphemism.

"Yes," he said. No one could be as evasive in the space of a three-letter, one-word sentence as this man could. He could say more with a _yes _than most people could with a thesis.

Trendzalore had been a week ago. He had done what no time traveller, no Time Lord, ever should; he had gone to his own graveside, entered his own tomb, and leapt into the raw wound of his own timeline, all to save her, after she had made the same leap to save him, after a man called Simeon (by this point she could already feel her brain start to fray like a too-plucked guitar string) had already made the same leap to attack the Doctor's entire lifespan, all at once.

Clara had created innumerable duplicates of herself, across space and time, all indelibly fated to encounter the Doctor in some way, some in small unnoticed ways, some in larger ways. Wherever Simeon – or the Great Intelligence, as he termed himself – struck at the Doctor, a version of her was going to be there, like a people-shaped anti-virus, cleaning up his timeline by saving his life, over and over and over.

She was out there, now; echoes of herself, scattered like…_like leaves on a tree_, she smiled to herself. So what did that make her?

She had so many questions. When he'd saved her, when the Doctor had plucked her out of that strange…interspace…she had inhabited, that central nexus of _Doctorness _where she'd seen the flashes of his previous lives and the hints of his future, she had been tired beyond all measure, tired in a way she didn't know existed or was even possible.

He'd brought her home, to London, and more or less carried her to bed where she'd been asleep before her head hit the pillow. When her eyes had finally reopened, two days had passed, and to her everlasting shock he was still there, bustling around the house, looking after Angie and Artie. She'd had the longest and deepest sleep of her life, and it had passed without hint of dream.

He'd gone later that afternoon, ducking and diving from her queries with the air of a man with centuries of practice. This morning a familiar wheezing and spluttering noise had woken her from sleep and sure enough, the squat blue box was outside the house once more. He hadn't emerged, and when she eventually grew impatient and simply tried to enter – without success; the TARDIS doors still wouldn't open for her, even with the key – he'd simply gestured her inside with a quicksilver smile and re-introduced her to Strax.

"Doctor-" she said.

_What happened on Trendzalore? Did we "win"? How did you die there, in the future? Doesn't it BOTHER you? Who was the man we saw in the interspace of your timeline? Why didn't you tell me you were married? _

"I know," he said, without even looking away from the console. "I know you have questions and I know you…" he sighed, and seemed to sag for a moment, reminding Clara that here was a being who despite his quite youthful appearance was actually immeasurably old, "…I know you, more than anyone ever has, _deserve_ answers to those questions. What you did for me, Clara," and he reached out and touched her hand and squeezed it, sending a jolt through her entire body she struggled to internalise, "you leapt into my life and saved me, and I will _never _be able to thank you enough."

Clara had a few false starts before she finally settled on a reply. Her voice held steady. "What I did," she said, as firmly as she could, "was no different than what you've done for thousands of people across the universe _your _whole life. You crash into people's lives, a little bit of you, sometimes different but always _you_, and you find a way to save them, even if they don't notice you doing it. How could I stand by and not do the same?"

He nodded, as if he was agreeing, but Clara could see that he didn't really _believe _her. _Why does he have this low opinion of himself? _she wondered. She had seen his whole timeline…saw glimpses, flashes, of the deeds of all of his past lives. His future selves were harder to discern; before that epic sleep she had thought herself capable of making out a detail here, a face there…but 48 hours of uninterrupted rest seemed to have consigned those particular spoilers to her subconscious. In all that she had seen, this man had been an immeasurable force for good.

_But I didn't see him._

He was the gap. The old man. The forgotten Doctor. Glimpses of all of his lives she had been granted, an access window for her photocopied soul to play some role…except for him.

"I'm taking Strax to Sontar," the Doctor said, "and then we're going to The Library."

She could hear the uppercase falling into place when he spoke the words. Not just _a _library; _The _Library, the one the size of a planet. The one where his tenth incarnation had negotiated a truce with the Vashta Nerada, nightmarish nanoscopic creatures, living shadows feasting on flesh. The Library where he had first encountered his wife, River Song…where she had died…and where a version of her was "saved" to the massive computer database at The Library's core.

"Aren't the Vashta Nerada still there?" Clara said.

He nodded. "I promised them the planet if they let me save the people."

"And to promise to leave you and your companions alone if you ever came back?"

He _hmmm'd _and inclined his head. "_Should_ have added that bit, shouldn't I," he admitted. "Still, we'll have a chinwag with them, see if we can work something out."

"Have a chinwag? With voraciously carnivorous micro-piranhas?"

"After we escape a planet of twenty-two billion of the best soldiers in the galaxy hellbent on my death in the middle of a blood fury brought on by the War Olympics, yes."

Clara rubbed her forehead with her fingertips, trying to avert the migraine that impending doom sometimes brought on in her. "So just another typical week for you, then."

"No," and he looked at her, "I'm getting to see my wife again."

She absorbed the look in his eyes, and suddenly the twenty-two billion Sontarans and the voraciously carnivorous micro-piranhas seemed about as threatening as thermonuclear candyfloss, because _nothing _was going to get in this man's way.

"Well then," she grinned, "let's get started, shall we?"

He threw levers and pressed switches, the TARDIS lurched, and they were on their way.


	3. There's Nothing Funny About Sontar

**Two**

**There's Nothing Funny About Sontar**

"Behold the unrivalled beauty of the homeworld of the mighty Sontaran Empire!" Strax trilled.

The TARDIS doors opened onto a ruined wasteland. Crumbling ruins of huge buildings stretched as far as the eye could see. Underneath a crimson sky, pink lightning struck the ground, setting off further explosions wherever it touched. Fires raged. From horizon to horizon, as far as Clara could see, the landscape around her was a charred cinder, lifeless and barren.

"Oh…" Clara said, as Strax padded out slowly between where she stood and the Doctor, staring silently at the devastation before him. "Oh Strax, I'm so sorry…"

"YOU!" Strax whirled, pointing his pulse rifle at the Doctor. Clara had to admit, as a pointing device, it beat the hell out of a toothbrush any day of the week.

"Me?" the Doctor said defensively, as Strax continued his advance.

"Strax, it's not his fault!" Clara said, trying – and failing, thanks to a gentle but nonetheless very firm arm extruded by the Doctor – to get between Strax and his gun and the target of his anger. "Whatever happened to Sontar, we can-"

"I'm LATE and it's YOUR fault! I have MISSED it all, and look – _look _– how glorious!"

About thirty miles behind him, the top of a massive rotunda-shaped building (not unlike a Sontaran head, she noted) finally gave up the ghost and slid with a noise like every blackboard in existence being fingernail-violated off the building it capped, falling with terrible slowness to the surface below, throwing up a huge cloud of dust and debris.

"What's going on?" Clara asked faintly.

"Ah, well…yes," the Doctor coughed delicately, checking his screwdriver's reading of the air around them and wincing at what he saw there. "I _do_ appear to be about a week later than I anticipated."

"Gahhhhh!" Strax said, shaking in fury. Just as Clara thought the little alien was about to lose what remained of his temper, he turned on his heel and blasted a few stray volleys of plasma into the air.

"But…" Clara began.

"Sssh, boy!" Strax motioned for silence with a hand in the air. He seemed to be listening-

_Thump. Thump, thump. Thump…thump._

Five little objects had fallen from the skies, the closest not ten feet from where they stood. Clara saw tiny, chitinous legs convulsively jerking for a moment before stopping. Plasma smoke curled from the body. It looked like a spider crossed with a wasp crossed with something you'd imagine crawling up your bed to get you if you were both a howling arachnophobe and a _stonking _great masochist.

Those volleys hadn't been so _stray _after all, she realised.

"Strax," the Doctor reprimanded harshly, "if you don't stop killing things I am going to have to rethink your TARDIS privileges, do you hear me?"

"I'm sorry _Doctor_," Strax replied, still visibly annoyed, "would you have preferred I let the Strikkomites alight on your boy's head and use their feeding tubes to ingest his brain matter?"

"Well…" the Doctor paused, "…just try to use more _non-lethal_ methods of obliteration if possible."

"Tcchhhh," Strax muttered in disgust, marching off to a nearby rise, presumably to get a better view of the ruins of his homeworld.

Clara tugged urgently on the Doctor's coat.

"Yes, I thought you'd have questions," he said mildly, and indicated the expanse around them with an airy sweep of the arm. "Fascinating race, the Sontarans. Entirely dedicated to war and to relentless self-improvement. Every fourth generation of clones they gather everyone to Sontar for the War Olympics…not their real name, of course, just the best the TARDIS translation circuit can come up with. Sort of a…smorgaswar," and he seemed pleased with himself at this, then a little ashamed at being pleased at naming so horrible a concept. "All-out war with one another, Sontaran against Sontaran, until only a few survivors are left, and since they're obviously the strongest, the next generations of clones are taken from them in the belief that this makes the Sontarans even stronger."

Incongruously pink lightning flashed. A wave of heat rolled over Clara from an explosion a few miles distant. At her feet, the debris had moved a little and as she glanced down, she saw two stumpy fingers attached to a hand attached to an arm attached to nothing at all.

"Right," she said.

The Doctor blew a contemplative gust of breath out of his cheeks. "Funny old universe innit?"

It was then that something rather unexpected happened. Inside Clara's mind, the jumble of emotions she was going through at bearing witness to the spectacle of the aftermath of Sontar's self-harming parted, and like a ray of light shining through clouds, knowledge descended upon her, insight taken directly from her immersion in the Doctor's timeline.

"You did this deliberately, didn't you."

He looked at her with that wounded animal look he always used when he'd been caught with his hand in the cookie jar of the cosmos. "Dunno what you m-"

"You knew if you arrived here on time Strax would participate and probably wouldn't survive. Odds of twenty-two billion to one or thereabouts, right? So you arrived late, knowing he'd be furious with you, but also knowing he'd be _alive _to be furious with you."

Strax was stalking back toward them. The Doctor moved close and spoke quickly and urgently. "Strax is a friend of mine but he's also a Sontaran and to a Sontaran, honour is life. If he suspects we kept him from this," and the Doctor looked around with an expression of genuine anger, "this _madness_ deliberately, he will kill himself rather than submit to the dishonour, do you understand?"

Clara nodded. "Yes."

"Come, Doctor!" Strax called. "I've selected my preferred landing zone – scorch marks indicate an optimal chance of survival for perhaps as long as several hours! To the past we go!"

"Strax," the Doctor said gently, "I can't take us back to the beginning of the War Olympics. Crossing your own timestream. Very bad."

_He's lying through his teeth_, Clara realised with a chill creeping up her spine. The Doctor was telling whoppers the size of blue whales and he wasn't blinking an eyelid of effort at doing so. She knew _why _he was lying in this instance, of course, and found it impossible to argue with his motivations or justification for doing so, but even so…it was somehow horrifying to see how _easily _this man made a lie seem like the truth, and more than that, like a truth created especially for you.

"Four generations onward, then!" Strax demanded, not missing a beat. "By then Sontar will have been rebuilt by the victors of these magnificent Games and I can participate with my new brothers."

The Doctor looked stumped by this. Clearly he hadn't anticipated Strax to be so creative. Clara could see him scrabbling for another gift-wrapped truth, but before he got a chance to deliver it, they heard the moaning.

Strax was on guard in an instant, sweeping the pulse rifle around. Clara was slightly touched to see how he instinctively moved to protect both her and the Doctor. She could see why the Time Lord so wanted to protect this remarkable little Sontaran.

"Ten metres to the north," Strax said, his voice clipped and efficient.

"It sounds like someone's hurt…" Clara said, taking a step forward. A gentle hand on her shoulder stopped her in her tracks.

The Doctor pointed up at the crimson skies above. "Not exactly a welcoming atmosphere," he said dryly. "The TARDIS is extending a bubble of Earth-normal air, but she has her limits…" and he coughed and added in a very bad rapid stage whisper, "especiallywhereitcomestoyou. Ahem. Let's allow Strax to deal with this, shall we?"

Clara glanced back at the squat blue box, narrowing her eyes. From the day and hour she had first entered the magical interior of that impossible little craft, she had had the overwhelming sensation the TARDIS wanted to spit her out, as though the ship were a jealous cat rubbing against the legs of its master and hissing at her whenever she got too close.

_I threw myself through time and space for your Master_, she thought at the machine, not even feeling slightly ridiculous for doing so. The TARDIS was much more than just a machine; she was a living being, and for something so powerful and so ancient and so important to the Doctor to have taken a dislike to her…well, it hurt, not to put too fine a point on it.

Strax was returning to them, carrying the body of another Sontaran. It was slightly breathtaking to see how effortlessly Strax supported the weight of one of his kin with no more apparent effort than Clara would have used to lift a tin of beans. As he entered the bubble of Earth-normal air, he laid his fellow Sontaran out with surprising tenderness. Clara could see immediately that the other alien was in a bad way; battle armour cracked and open, oozing discharge from various body parts. The Doctor ran the screwdriver over the body, and caught Strax's eyes with a quick shake of his head.

"Identify yourself, soldier!" Strax barked.

The Sontaran's eyes opened. "I am-" he began, and then his strength faltered. The Doctor aimed the screwdriver at one of his particularly bad wounds, and it seemed to dial down the pain enough for the Sontaran to speak. "I am Stront, of the Five Thousandth Legion."

"Five Thousandth!" Strax said, in awe. For a moment Clara honestly thought he was going to bow.

"Sontar's elite. Winners of the last three Olympics. Favourites for this one," the Doctor murmured in Clara's direction.

"The Doctor," Stront said.

"Him?" Strax said with a hearty guffaw so hugely wooden animals could have sheltered in it two by two. "No. He's just a Doctor impersonator. I brought him along to the War Olympics so that we might have had sport with his corpse. I see the Games were glorious-!"

"Games?" Stront coughed.

Clara felt another chill pass through her. It was all going wrong, she realised.

"There were no games. The Doctor…he came. His TARDIS…different. _Huge_. He said he was going to give us our greatest wish…war. War with him. No more…hiding and running, he said."

Clara and Strax were staring at the Doctor. His expression was unreadable, but when he spoke, his lips hardly moved at all.

"He called himself The Doctor?"

Stront coughed blood once more. "He…_was_ The Doctor!" Stront said. "Everything our stories said about him…everything our legends whispered of. The Storm. The Beast. He was all of those things…all of them and more. He cut the mighty Sontaran Empire to its knees and when we disgraced ourselves by begging for mercy, he looked on us with disgust and bade his TARDIS to rip our world apa_rrrrtttt…_" and Stront twisted in agony, holding the wound at his side, his body seeming to shrink inside the combat armour. Clara touched the Doctor's arm – _can't you do something? _– but he met her eyes and she knew he had done all he could.

"It was _glorious_," Stront said, and died.

"Scan for life-forms. Use the TARDIS to boost your screwdriver's range," Strax commanded the Doctor. Clara watched as the Doctor obeyed, without comment, without question. He raised the screwdriver to his head, shook it, did so again. Then he sighed and sat back down.

"We're the only people left," he said, looking to the TARDIS, "old girl must have set us down near the survivor. She knew we'd need to see this."

Strax absorbed the Doctor's words, as Clara watched in horrified fascination. "But," she said, "there are other Sontarans out there, yes? You've got spaceships? Colony worlds?"

"The Games call us all home," Strax replied. "During War Olympiads all Sontaran offworld outposts are run by mechanised service units. It's a risk, and every time we lose many worlds, but it's one of the first trials of the new generations of clones – taking back our territories. There are few greater honours."

Though he spoke of his favourite topics of war and honour and death, his voice was flat and emotionless. Clara had seen Strax try to obliterate raindrops with an umbrella and relish every swing doing so. She worried what Stront's testimony that it had been the Doctor responsible for this act of genocide would lead to, but Strax did not seem angry, and when the Doctor laid a hand on his little friend's shoulder, the Sontaran did not shrink from it.

"I am the last of my people," Strax said heavily.

The Doctor slid into a half-crouch, the better to address an alien a little over half his considerable height. He took Strax by the shoulders and spoke to him with such sheer ferocity of conviction Clara was reminded the Doctor's truths were equally as powerful as his lies.

"Then it's lucky you're the _best _of your people, Strax," the Doctor said. "You can rebuild the Sontaran race. I will help you do this, I swear it."

"Rebuild? A race of war-obsessed soldiers bent on nothing less than universal conquest, and your personal destruction as a consequence?" Strax asked the Doctor.

"You're the last Sontaran. They will be in _your _image now," the Doctor said gently.

"A race of nurses!" Strax spluttered.

"A race who can _change_," the Doctor returned. "You were a mindless warrior once, Strax. Since then you've been a nurse, a butler, and for a brief and unfortunate period, a burlesque dancer. For someone belonging to a race ordered to shoot me on sight and blow up the planet, you've done a pretty poor job of both."

"I was getting around to it," Strax muttered, and for a moment it took all Clara had not to hug him.

"Come with me," the Doctor said.

"I…cannot, there is so much work…the cloning process…" Strax said helplessly. "My place is here."

"Your place is by my side. I'm going to find the person who did this," the Doctor said, "and I'm going to look them in the eye and ask them why. And then I'm going to let _you _do the same."

Clara looked from Strax to the Doctor. A moment of understanding was passing between the two men, one that she wasn't sure she particularly liked the look of.

"Where are we going?" she asked, as they left a ruined Sontar behind and re-entered the TARDIS.

The Doctor smiled humourlessly. "I have the sudden urge," he said, "to spoil myself..."


	4. Beam Me Up, Nuddy

**Three**

**Beam Me Up, Nuddy**

Until now, Clara had never thought of silence as a tangible thing. She realised that up until that moment she had only really known _quiet_, which was a remarkable absence of noise. She had never known true silence, at least not before she stood on Index Plaza, the round-shaped central hub of the Library.

It was a vast sunlit piazza, with a branch extending off toward the horizon encompassing tall buildings set in front of even taller buildings, all connected with skywalks like the veins and arteries of some vast nervous system. Every branch was a letter in every alphabet in the universe. Every building was its own massive repository of books, manuscripts, scrolls…and those were just the books written down. There were buildings where the knowledge was stored in smells in jars or in liquid inside test tubes.

As a child, Clara had gone to her local library with her Dad, and she'd always insisted on sitting on a little white chair set with bright red roses in the children's corner where she could curl up and read. As she'd grown, the books had gone from big and wooden and chew-proof to smaller and chunkier and less bright and colourful, until the day she'd gotten up from the little white chair, or at least tried to…only for the chair to remain attached to her. Her Dad had told her that she was too big, but that the little chair loved her so much it was trying to hold on to her for as long as it could, and who could blame it?

A gentle touch fell on her shoulder. The Doctor smiled as she glanced over. "It's something, isn't it," he said quietly, looking around at the place.

"It's sad," Clara replied. "This is somewhere a million children could find a special little reading corner of their own, and there's no-one here but us."

His expression clouded a little at that. "Well," he said, inhaling sharply, "that's not _quite _true…"

Clara glanced around, her wonder replaced with trepidation. In her awe at the scale of this place, she'd only gone and forgotten about the microscopic cannibalistic nano-piranhas, and that was no mean feat. Every shadow suddenly seemed to loom and shimmer. She found herself counting the shadows that she and the Doctor and Strax were casting around them as they stood. One each, squat and stocky due to the Library's sun blazing directly overhead.

"Fear not, boy," Strax said, re-configuring his trusty pulse rifle before her very eyes – the barrel was folded upwards and inwards and the sights became a display, until the whole device was almost unrecognisable. With a final twist and press a steady _bleep-bleep-bleep _begin softly chirping. "Medical scanner," Strax said, catching her quizzical look. "Sontarans have encountered the Hungry Dark before. We know what to look for."

"Your pulse rifle becomes a medical scanner?" Clara said, mildly incredulously.

"How else could I obliterate those I cannot save?" Strax responded, genuinely puzzled.

The Doctor was waving his screwdriver in the air like a man conducting a phantom orchestra. Sometimes Clara feared he would topple over, but always those gangling limbs found a way to right themselves. He glared at the device accusingly as though it were deliberately trying to annoy him, and sighed. "We should be able to access the data core from any of the entry terminals…"

_Bleep-bleep-bleep_

She knew that tone. "But…?" she prompted, bracing herself.

"Place is falling apart. Very slowly, and very grandly, thanks to some excellent building materials and not a lot of moisture in this atmosphere, but without anyone here to run it…" he clucked in annoyance, "the terminals are shutting down as the planet's core tries to conserve power to the systems still running. We'll have to go to one of the main interfaces."

_Bleep-bleep-bleep_

"And they are?" she prompted again.

He gestured vaguely upwards. "Roofs of the main buildings. To collect solar power, you see."

"So let's hop the TARDIS onto one, then," Clara suggested.

_Bleep-bleep-bleep_

"Yes," the Doctor nodded readily. "Simple solution," and as Clara started to move back toward the TARDIS he reached out and gently and firmly stopped her right in her tracks, "two problems."

_Bleep-bleep-bleep_

"Yes?" Clara asked, increasingly frustrated. _I wonder if any of my myriad of temporally-displaced clones ever had the urge to smack him one and make him get on with imparting vital information at any speed besides "glacial"? _she wondered idly.

"Well firstly," the Doctor said, "Strax's scanner doesn't _bleep _when everything is clear. It _bleeps _when it isn't. And secondly, the shadows."

Clara spun around like a person trying to rid themselves of the world's biggest wasp. One shadow. Thank God. She checked the Doctor and Strax. Both displayed only one.

"I don't see an extra-" she began.

"Not us," the Doctor said.

The TARDIS had two shadows.

One in the correct position, pointing away from the Sun overhead. The other shadow pointed toward them. Clara would have had to run across it, into it, to open the TARDIS doors, and she would have done so had the Doctor not prevented her.

As she watched, that shadow began to lengthen.

"Doctor," Strax said warningly. He began to reconfigure the scanner in his hands.

"Guns are no use!" the Doctor barked at him. "Put it on wide-beam visual display – can it let us tell the difference between shadows that are real and those that aren't?"

The approaching dark was only twenty feet away now. The trio backed off, deeper into the piazza. Clara looked up at the sun; it was directly overhead now, but surely before long it would start to sink in the sky, and when it did the looming towers in all directions would cast long shadows, impossible to hide from.

"We have to get inside," she hissed. A cold terror was tugging at her heart; she had seen Ice Warriors and Spoonheads and those _things _the Great Intelligence had thrown at them on Trendzalore, all of them in their own way horrible, but all of them at least were solid, were _real_. How did you fight a shadow? How _could _you?

"Reconfiguring!" Strax said. A little half-dome shaped bubble of light seemed to fizzle into existence around them for a moment, with a radius of about twenty feet across. Immediately the faux-shadow of the TARDIS encroaching was turned from black to red. Now it looked as though a giant bloodstain was seeping inexorably their way. _Much _more reassuring, Clara thought.

"Another one!" the Doctor called. Clara shrank back further as a second shadow, this one unattached to the TARDIS and instead springing forth from one of the buildings at the opposite side of the piazza, crossed the boundary of their bubble, forcing the trio to change direction once more.

"We're being herded," she said numbly, and turned, knowing as she did so what she would see and feeling her stomach knot as she saw it. A third pool of darkness had formed. She didn't need Strax's device to know it was not a natural shadow, and it was cutting off their only avenue of retreat.

"Vashta Nerada!" the Doctor boomed. "When we last met we made a deal – that I would grant you this planet in return for the chance to save those left alive in its databanks. You honoured that deal!"

Strax's bubble showed red on all sides now. There was nowhere left to retreat to. They were stranded in a shrinking circle of light, a closing iris of life.

Clara saw the lights.

The Doctor was continuing to speak, as quickly as she'd ever heard him, and completely oblivious to the fact that one of the massive buildings facing them, easily a match for any skyscraper on Earth, was lighting up, one window at a time.

The illuminated windows were spelling out letters. HELL, Clara read. _Tell me something I don't know._

"You must give me more time!" the Doctor was saying. Strax beside him had just finished reconfiguring his scanner back into a pulse rifle and was firing randomly into the shadows, now black once more.

HELLO.

"I'm warning you!" the Doctor said, whirling like a dervish to address the shadows all around them, now no more than eight feet away. "If you don't stop, I'll-"

"Hello sweetie," Clara read aloud.

"_What _did you say?" the Doctor demanded, grabbing her by the shoulders as Strax continued to fire and fire and the shadows seemed for one awful moment to _leap_-

Light.

Motion.

"Ugh," she heard a familiar voice to her left, much to her surprise. The world around her was still a whitewash, as though someone had gotten tired of the visual universe and hit a giant "undo" key a few trillion times. "I'd forgotten how much I despise transmats. Awful way to travel. Not even a _whoosh _noise."

"Sontar models have in-transmat games," another familiar voice noted, with some pride.

"Yes, I've played _For The Good of The Sontar Empire, Obliterate the Ungulates With the Avian Instruments Of Mass Destruction_," the Doctor's voice replied. "I keep getting stuck on level 37."

Details began to coalesce around her. She was, she dimly realised, barrelling down an endless tunnel of white light at what seemed to be about half the speed of everything added together. A shape to her right was the Doctor, and to her left Strax.

"Course the _other _reason I hate this model of transmat-" the Doctor continued.

"Oh my GOD!" Clara said, and clasped various parts of herself with her hands. After a second of contemplation, she juggled this arrangement somewhat, and then shut her eyes. "Doctor," she said, as calmly as she could given the circumstances, "not that I'm not grateful we're not being devoured by nano-piranhas, but why _exactly_ am I naked?!"

Strax made a rolling noise of disgust in his throat. "Representing clothes takes up valuable bandwidth, boy! Would you rather you arrived with all of your ridiculous floppy parts intact, or would you rather be clad in that awful jumpsuit during transmat?"

Clara's eyes snapped open in outrage. "_Awful jumpsuit?_" she said indignantly, and her eyes located Strax within the transmat beam in order to give him a damn good talking to. "That's a bit rich coming froOOOOM-OH MY HOLY GOOD LORD ABOVE!"

Her eyes snapped shut again, this time perhaps forever. She was fine with that. She was just fine with that. In fact, if someone could get her a diamond-encrusted Brillo pad for the inside of her eyelids, that'd be just peachy.

"I was surprised too," the Doctor's voice broke in on Clara's dark little bright pink and flushing little world of mortification, musing thoughtfully. "For a race that reproduce asexually, you'd think Sontarans would have no need for…" and he coughed delicately.

"I never thought I'd be nostalgic for micro-piranhas," Clara muttered. "How long do transmats _take-_"

There was a jolt, and she felt solidity beneath her feet once more.

"You can open your eyes," the Doctor called cheerfully. "The Sontaran is back in the barracks."

Clara did so, and found herself in a large room filled with computer equipment, terminals, monitors and the like. They had sprung back into existence on a circular raised dias, which she found oddly comforting, and yes indeed they were fully clothed once more, which she found _extraordinarily _comforting. _Awful jumpsuit_, she thought darkly, patting down her eclectic skirt-and-jacket ensemble and glaring at Strax and his all-in-one robo-chic.

"I can't leave you alone for five minutes, can I," a familiar voice sounded. River's face had appeared on one of the monitor screens around the room. "You're welcome for the emergency transmat, by the way. Promise I didn't peek at the beam-in footage…much…"

"Trendzalore?" the Doctor asked.

River cocked her head to the side. "Been and gone, if that's what you're asking," she said. "Don't worry you haven't come out of order this time."

"Pity," the Doctor muttered.

"Are we safe in here?" Clara asked. The room was so brightly lit from so many different sources that she couldn't see any hint of shadow the Vashta Nerada could exploit.

River's smile waned. "No," she said. "But you'll be safe in here. With us. At least for a while."

"In here?" Clara echoed. "But – I thought you were just data? Inside a computer?"

"This is my wife we're talking about," the Doctor said with the merest hint of admonishment, and for the first time since Sontar she could hear the note of tension in his voice begin to ease. "She's never been _just _anything."

"Ready?" River said.

"Ready for w-"

_10101010101010100101010101010101010101010101010101 01010101010101010101010111001_

"-hat?"

Just like that, they were outside, on the outskirts of a park. She could see children playing on the swings. A row of houses bordered the greenery, and about a hundred feet away sat a large and ornate residence which looked to Clara's admittedly inexpert opinion like a country club for geezers. The air had a faint chill, like it was early October or late March. Wherever they were, it wasn't the Library.

The Doctor was looking at her, she saw. She knew that look. He was waiting for her to work things out, as though she were a little hamster he'd placed inside a maze of tubing. It was faintly condescending in a very condescending sort of way, but she knew this man well enough to know that asking him to stop it, or even getting him to realise he was doing it, would be pointless in the extreme. It was, in a very real way, _who _he was.

"We're inside the computer core," she said. It hadn't been that hard to work out, in truth. She glanced down at herself, still dressed as before, and pinched her skin. _Ow_. "What happened to my body?"

"Converted to data. I mean, what are bodies really, except a huge set of biological instructions?"

"_Love_ it when he talks dirty."

River had arrived. Clara envied the older woman then, with an intensity that surprised her. River was rarely lost for words, rarely lost for anything. She arrived on the scene with an air of someone accustomed to being the most interesting person in the room and normally that should have come off as irritating, but somehow River could make it work, and even with the Doctor present you felt she was still fairly sure of her crown.

The Doctor and his wife embraced. This went on for a few seconds, and then a few seconds more, until Clara found something rivetingly fascinating about a tree stump to her right, feeling her cheeks bloom with embarrassment for what seemed to be the four hundredth time in the last five minutes.

"Speaking as a nurse," Strax said abruptly, "I must remind both of you that lack of oxygen _will _become an issue."

It seemed to do the trick. The Doctor looked very embarrassed, Clara noted with no small amount of satisfaction. He was like an awkward schoolboy, all arms and gestures and harrumphs while River just twinkled beside him, clearly beside herself with joy to see him here.

"Yes," the Doctor coughed, "yes, well. Excellent. Obviously. That's all in order, then…" he looked around their surroundings with some interest, "all very nice."

"It's not what you expected," River said. It was not a question.

"No," the Doctor admitted.

She walked toward the country club style building Clara had noticed previously, and beckoned for them to follow. "Come in," she said. "I have a surprise for you."

Not waiting for them to catch up, she started to run, gracefully and easily, until she was halfway to the country club and still accelerating. The Doctor and Clara exchanged glances. Strax, meanwhile, having had quite enough of human interaction, had found one of the swings. He gave it an experimental push, and his head swung back and forth as he followed its reciprocal motion.

"You," he barked, to a nearby child, "what is the purpose of this device? Speak quickly!"

"It's a swing innit," said the child, and _ssnnnnffff'd _a massive globule of snot back into its nose. "You swing on it."

"Ah! To make you a moving target?"

The child looked at the Sontaran warrior doubtfully. When it spoke, it was in the exaggeratedly loud and slow tone used to address the hard of thinking. "Do you have someone who looks after you?"

"Oh leave him to it," the Doctor said, as he and Clara made their way after River.

"Are you going to ask her?"

"About?"

She sighed. "About what happened to Sontar, of course. This…_other _Doctor who's going around pretending to be you."

The Doctor's jaw was tight. "Pretending. Mmm."

"Is it the Doctor I saw? In your timeline?"

"I don't know," he said.

"I didn't recognise him," she said quickly, knowing how rare these opportunities were, and dreading going into that building and him being so wrapped up in River (her brain abruptly leapt from that unfortunate phrasing like a scalded cat) that his shields would be up and she wouldn't get a chance to ask him these questions. "I recognised all the others…the ones that the," and she struggled to come up with a reasonable phrase for something that was so inherently insane, "the _copies _of me helped to save, but I didn't recognise him. I've never saved him. I've never _met _him. But I've met all of you, Doctor. How is that possible?"

He stopped, and spared her one of those hooded glances he was so fond of. She'd met him hundreds of times across hundreds of worlds and yet she felt a million miles away from him. What did it _take_ to know this man?

"I…" he said, and then he stopped, as though his voice had simply dried up. He had a look of such naked astonishment, such jaw-dropped wonder that Clara couldn't help herself; she turned to look.

There was a man, standing at the front gate of the country club. He was avuncular, or if you were unkind you may have described him as portly, with a mane of mad scientist white hair and a sparkle in his eyes. She put him at over seventy years old, give or take. He was wearing cricket whites, but in his hand he held a small white paper bag.

"I don't believe it," said the Doctor.

"I don't believe it," said Clara.

"Care for a jelly baby?" said the other Doctor, rustling the bag, and then he slapped himself on the forehead. "What am I thinking – she told me you're a Jammie Dodger man. Hold on a mo…" and he stuck his hand into his trouser pocket and rummaged for what, to Clara, was an indecently concerning amount of time, before producing small and round and rather battered, which delighted him beyond measure, "I _knew _I had one! Here you go, old chap! No? How about you, young lady?"

Before she could stop him, he had dropped the ancient Jammie Dodger in her hand. It was warm. She disposed of it as politely as she could whilst still getting rid of it as _fast_ as humanly possible.

"I _knew _you couldn't wait!" another voice called. A slightly younger man, with hair that may once have been golden but was now flecked with silver, bounced out and put a companionable arm around his biscuit-offering companion. He took in the sight of the visitors with delight. He too was wearing cricket whites, but he wore them like a second skin. "He _is _young," he said.

"I know," said the Doctor, "has he started shaving yet? What's going on? If it keeps going at this rate we'll be an embryo by the time our final regeneration rolls around."

"Oy!" an Estuary-accented voice shouted, and a head poked around the corner of the front doors. "_Some_ of us aren't getting any younger, you know!"

"Come on then," the Doctor said, "let's get you both inside. We'll have a good talk amongst ourselves."

The other cricket-clad Doctor groaned. "Will you _stop _with that?" he said.

"Well I don't know," the Doctor huffed. "If you can't laugh at yourself, what can you do, eh?"

Chuckling merrily at this, the two Doctors moved up the path into the country club proper, leaving Clara and _her _Doctor standing at the gate. They stood there, like that, neither one moving or talking, for a few seconds. Finally, Clara felt the time had come to break the silence.

"It's sweet," she managed.

"_Sweet_?"

"Yes," she went on gamely. "River said, didn't she. She was lonely, you hadn't come to see her."

"_Lonely_?"

"Yes," Clara concluded.

"You're saying my wife created ten versions of me because she was lonely."

"What else could she possibly want with ten of you?" Clara asked.

There was another long and contemplative pause, and Clara made a mental note that between this and the vision of a naked Strax mid-transmat, if and when they ever returned to Earth she was going to give serious thought to becoming a nun.

"RIVER!" the Doctor said, running full pelt through the front doors.


End file.
